Soccer player reappears years after everyone thought he died

A former prominent soccer player has reappeared four years after being pronounced dead in a car accident, a report said.

Hiannick Kamba’s former wife is being accused of fraud after she allegedly forged documents and collected a six-figure life insurance payment following the soccer player’s phony passing, German prosecutor Anette Milk told the Bild, a German tabloid.

The former defender for the highly acclaimed Schalke 04 in the German Bundesliga was said to have been killed in a January 2016 car crash in his native Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Instead, the 33-year-old Kamba claims “his companions had left him during the night while on a trip to the interior of the Congo in January 2016 and they took his papers, money and telephone,” according to Milk.

Kamba recently was found to be alive in Gelsenkirchen, located in western Germany. In 2018, Kamba headed to the German embassy in Kinshasa to debunk the tale of his death, though he said he faced a couple years of trouble trying to reclaim his old life because he was without his papers.

The report didn’t detail how Kamba managed to survive and it was not indicated who were the “companions.”

Kamba, who now works as a chemical technician for an energy supply company, said he was unaware of his ex-wife’s alleged actions, and will be named a witness in the case. The former couple have a 10-year-old child together. The ex-wife was not identified in the news story.

Kamba, at the time of the fake crash, was playing for the VfB Huls and had been toiling in the bottom tiers of German soccer. Kamba also played youth soccer for highly touted Schalke and was a teammate of current Germany national team star goaltender Manuel Neuer.

Kamba and his family fled the Congo for Germany in 1986, but the whole family except Kamba was deported in 2005.

Kamba was allowed to stay because of Shalke’s high status in Germany, and was granted residency rights.

source: nypost.com